Michelangelo And The Sistine Chapel (17 page)

The last painting in the final triad of the ceiling’s narrative frescoes is
The Drunkenness of Noah
. The picture is a lesson in human frailty, and a meditation on the mysterious workings of God. At first glance it might appear to be one of the most backwardlooking of Michelangelo’s compositions. But in fact it is a highly inventive, unusual picture, pregnant with possibility for future generations of artists.

As in the narrative paintings of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the painting breaks with the unities of time, place and action to tell its story like a comic strip, with the same protagonist shown in two different situations at two different moments in time. To the left, the red-robed Noah sets to with his spade, working the land that God has spared from the Flood, and has blessed with fertility: ‘And Noah began to be an husbandman; and he planted a vineyard’ (Genesis 9: 20). He is silhouetted against a harsh white sky and confronted with an expanse of yellow ochre ground that seems so harsh and desert-like that his spade barely penetrates its surface. In this particular passage of the painting, Michelangelo proposes an image as simple and emblematic as a piece of heraldry, as schematic as the
impresa
on a Renaissance shield or flag – a rugged symbol of the lot of man after the Fall, doomed to a life of hard labour.

To the right, Noah appears again. But this time he is naked, no longer the righteous patriarch but an all too mortal man, who has indulged too much in the wine that his vineyard has produced: ‘And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent’ (Genesis 9: 21). He reclines in a stupor, his head sunk upon his chest. He appears as another of Michelangelo’s parodies of the figure of an ancient Roman river god, like the petrified boy hunched over the wine cask in
The Deluge
. His sons, Ham, Shem and Japheth, shocked by the sudden apparition of their inebriated father, gesticulate and prepare to cover his nakedness.

Detail from
The Death of Haman

David and Goliath
(above) and
Judith and Holofernes
(below)

The Death of Haman
(below) and
The Brazen Serpent
(above and overleaf)

Above : two lunettes from the Ancestors of Christ sequence Previous page: two of the
ignudi
that frame the central narratives

Two lunettes from the Ancestors of Christ sequence

The sibyls: (clockwise from top left)
The Delphic Sibyl
,
The Cumaean Sibyl
,
The Erythraean Sibyl
and
The Persian Sibyl

The Libyan Sibyl